If there’s one generation-defining skill that creators need to learn going forward, what will it be? My bet: The ability to make, then monetize fans. The same way how years ago we talked about “googling” as a now-essential skill, the creators that have the highest engagement and return-per-follower are those that… truly understand how to […]

If you’re shooting video in 2022, chances are you’ll post it across multiple social media channels and platforms in a variety of resolutions native to said platform. The generally accepted best way to do this is by capturing horizontal video at a 16:9 aspect ratio, then converting it to formats like square (1:1) or vertical […]

How does a creator ‘figure things out’ and become successful? I was just asked that question on a podcast (coming out in a few weeks), and there are a million ways I could answer that sound smart, but only one that rings true: Experimentation. Unfortunately, experimentation can kill any business quickly if it is costly […]

I’m excited to announce that as of today, I’m Koji‘s new Head of Creators. At Koji, I’ll be leading (and building) a creator success team that includes the sub-pillars of community, marketing, partnerships, business development, DevRel and more. Together with co-founders Sean and Dmitry, I’ll also be driving Koji’s product strategy going forward. Koji has […]

Friday, April 1 (no April fools!) is my last day at Google. My mom reminded me recently that when I started coding at the age of 12, my dream was to one day work at Google. I still can’t believe that this German high school dropout somehow managed to turn that into a reality some […]

I once wondered out loud why famous musicians are almost expected to burn out and overdose at some point in their careers, and other types of celebrities less so. I forgot who my partner was in that conversation, but they responded that it’s much harder to be a musician than to be an actor, because […]

If you’re like me, you faced this problem a thousand times: You browse through a Google slide deck, find an animated GIF or image that you want to save and put into another document, deck or resource, but there is no apparent way to do this. Is this sounds familiar, you’ve come to the right place.

Rex Woodbury publishes a great newsletter on Substack called Digital Native, and in his summary this week, he writes: While Web2 created enormous value, value always passed through a middleman. Centralized platforms—Facebook, Uber, Twitter, YouTube—control the data and make the rules. Web3 is about ownership. It’s about the direct connection between creators and consumers, obfuscating the […]

Yours truly was recently invited as guest to the JS Party podcast to talk about…not JS! If you’ve been wondering about where the the part of the web is going that is “content”, why it’s so critical to invest in it & the web creator landscape, and what Google is doing about it, I think […]

I’m a big fan of Core Web Vitals, and the cumulative set of criteria that Google calls “Page Experience”, and that is not a coincidence! In the many conversations I’ve had with AMP haters skeptics, most have asked “why we can’t just measure whether something is fast & user friendly” when talking about why only […]